I grew up in a town with a population of less than 100 people. I have lived in small towns in Idaho, Illinois, North Carolina, and New York, and spent enough times in small towns in Pennsylvania to have some perspective on life from the hills there.
I have also lived in rust belt cities like Buffalo, and spent time on the Pacific coast in Tacoma -I must admit don't remember much about it because I was so young, and I've lived in Los Angeles for a time. All totaled about 20% of my life has been spent living in large cities and about 80% of my time has been spent living in small town USA.
Idaho is the second most Republican of environment I have lived in behind rural upstate New York. Illinois and coastal North Carolina are probably on par for their levels of liberalism, which is greater than either upstate New York or Idaho. The level of racial tolerance and equality in small town Illinois is unquestionably the most tolerant of anywhere I have lived in the United States, including any major city.
In addition to my numerous residences in small town America, I spent some time as a truck driver living my life on the highways of rural America with brief forays into cities for deliveries and pick ups, and a lot of time spent in the truck stops of rural America, so I believe my perspective on small town and rural American life is as well researched as most could get. I mean I've lived in the Mountain West, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast, so that is a fairly varied background, especially when you throw in my time on the road.
Here is what I've learned in more than thirty years of living in small towns and eight years living in big cities: People from the city know absolutely nothing about life in the country, and people from the country know absolutely nothing about life in the city.
They do not speak the same language, and they do not have the same concerns, generally, although they have more in common than would be expected.
In the city a man with a gun is dangerous. In the country, a man with the gun more often than not intends to add venison, rabbit, or some game bird to their diet. In the city people really hate drug addicts and don't want them in their neighborhood, but probably aren't going to do anything about it because the violent criminals will hurt them. In the country people really hate drug addicts and don't want them in their neighborhood, but aren't going to do anything about it, because it is none of their business what the other guy is doing.
In the city when a factory closes a lot of people lose their jobs and life gets bad for some people, but there are some other jobs to replace the lost jobs. In vibrant cities, there are enough jobs that it probably won't crush the economy, in not so vibrant cities, things will get bad until real estate gets cheap enough to become attractive to artists and entrepreneurs ready to start building service industry businesses like coffee shops and restaurants and bars, then things will improve a bit as a few computer guys start companies there, then life just starts getting better and better, UNLESS the city is primarily black, then it might get really bad and almost blows away because you can't get bank financing to do anything to fix up the community.
In small town USA if the factory closes it is devastating to the economy and people move away. Jobs all over town are hurt by the loss of a factory and the community starts to die. The banks will lend money to buy places, but there really is no market to rebuild the economy from for small business people. The community that remains gets by, but things are on a downward slide at a pace only slightly better than black inner cities in America.
Nobody cares about the plight of the rural poor and the rural communities that are losing ground because there is no money to be made from those communities. Nobody cares about the black inner cities in America because there is very little money to be made from those communities, but if they can gentrify a piece of those cities, they will do so in an effort to slowly rebuild the city and make it prosperous for a white middle class which makes their livings operating keyboards.
If you come from a community that made physical things for a living, Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo or Pittsburgh, the chances are pretty good that unless there are enough white areas of your city left outside the banks' redlines to begin a gentrification process, you are going to be left behind. If you come from a rural community that made things, unless you have a military base in your area, or some other favorable government supported institution such as prisons, the odds are pretty good you will be left behind during any economic recovery.
I will admit that I haven't spent enough time in the South or spent enough time in small towns in the south to figure out if the phenomenon I have observed in the rural parts of the North is a trend there as well, but it has been my observation that as northern cities have become more gentrified, rural towns in the Northern part of the United States have seen significant migration from the cities to the country in the black community. This trend started during the Reagan administration, probably in no small part because of the affordability of housing in rural communities and less repressive policing that generally occurs in small towns. In more recent years the repressive police tactics have started to spread to rural communities as well, at least in the Northeast.
These are socioeconomic and demographic trends I've observed first hand and cultural phenomena I have observed during my years here in America which I think explain well why the Democratic Party fails to obtain votes in rural America.
The issue of guns is an easy wedge issue to divide rural voters against their own economic interests, but most importantly, the Democratic Party truly DOES NOTHING on the economic front to improve the lives of rural Americans. In reality the two most underrepresented voting blocks in America are poor white trash living in rural America and their poor black brethren in the inner cities of abandoned industrial America.
The Democratic Party pays lip service to the Middle Class and today that term generally means over-educated urban and suburbanites of all races who perform middle management jobs for business or some other kind of white collar work, with almost no mention of the people who do the kind of "Dirty Jobs" Mike Rowe championed, and that is a mistake. Even the best paid of those folks consider themselves working class, or poor, not middle class. This is a distinction, WITH A HUGE DIFFERENCE.
On the other side of the equation, the Republican Party sells a lie to the people doing hard physical labor in the construction trades and the handful of other physical jobs still left in America that the Democrats want to raise their taxes and give the money to people who don't work for a living, and considering the fact that the people who vote Democratic, with the exception of a dwindling number of trade unionists are white collar workers, whom those people perceive as overpaid non-workers, in addition to welfare recipients who they loathe, Democrats are losing votes they should be winning.
Taxes lose the Democratic Party the working class, because labor is taxed at the highest rate of any income in America, so whenever you talk about raising taxes on the wealthy, they feel that pain badly. The problem of course is that a man or woman who comes home physically exhausted with their back, legs, and arms aching has very different concerns than the man or woman who comes home mentally exhausted, and they speak different languages as well.
The man or woman with an aching back wants a beer at the end of the day, and probably a shower. The man or woman with an aching mind at the end of the day wants a wine or a liquor, and doesn't really want to think about anything. The man or woman with an aching back doesn't often spend a lot of time thinking about anything of substance, but those who do, generally know that the boss man has it too good because of the hard work they do, only a small portion of that group that likes to think understands who is the real bossman. The problem of course is that the real bossman has hired the man or woman with the exhausted mind to take care of the work involved with being a bossman for them, and the man or woman with the aching back blames middle management, while the wealthy get away with it.
This may seem like incoherent rambling, and at times it might actually be incoherent rambling. Thoughts which make the connections important to grow political support rarely come in thirty second sound bites.
In my experience, a large enough portion of the jobs left in rural America are of the working class variety with aching backs, that this failure of understanding in the demographics truly has a negative impact on the results of the Democratic Party in rural Congressional Districts.
How to combat it in my opinion is with messaging which will rally both the disenfranchised voters of America's crumbling black inner cities and America's crumbling white small towns.
Rebuilding the infrastructure that Senator Sanders, President Obama, and a few others have talked about is a step in the right direction. Rebuilding infrastructure creates the jobs those "real" workers need. Construction work, which has at the end of the day visible results of a product built by aching muscles. Unfortunately it is only a half measure if the right language isn't also used to sell not merely the necessity of the investment, but the importance of "real" work.
I'm going to say something which helps define where I'm coming from and why I think this messaging is important. I have a post doctoral degree, and a license to practice the law, so in addition to some time behind the wheel of a tractor trailer, I've spent a lot of days in court rooms representing poor people and working people primarily in family matters and occasionally in criminal matters. In other words, I understand mentally exhausting work.
Before I became a truck driver, or a lawyer, I was also a farmer, a grocery store clerk, a paper mill worker, and a furniture mover, so I've known physically exhausting work too.
But here is the kicker, after I stopped practicing the law, I started to do construction work, and it was the most satisfying work I've done. At the end of the day my muscles ached, but my accomplishments were obvious. You could see what I had built and knew without question what I had accomplished in a day. That "real" work leaves tangible lasting results that mental work rarely leaves.
When you spend time with construction workers, and furniture movers, or factory workers, it gives you a perspective on life that a secretary, or doctor, or attorney, rarely has, but I won't say the same for a computer programer or artist because they leave tangible results behind too. In between those other lives I've lead, I've had time to work in movies and television, as well, so I've known the joy of seeing something I write turned into projected images on a screen, and I've known the joy of seeing something I merely was an errand boy on become a real artistic product for consumption as well. A sense of accomplishment is important in life.
I've gone off on a tangent, so I will try to return to the point of this rambling, and that point is this, if Democrats want to win a broader swath of the American public, acknowledge the WORKING CLASS and the MIDDLE CLASS, point out that they used to be synonyms, and should be again, helping restore the prominence of unions will do that, making unions an issue will do that. Pointing out the disastrous effects of trade agreements we have in place, while pointing out that the next President or this President with the stroke of a pen could cancel them and start to restore American manufacturing can and will help. The current crop of candidates shouldn't merely challenge Obama on the TPP, but should encourage him to undue the disaster of Permanent Normalized Trade Relations with China, and possibly undue NAFTA and the WTO.
Two very different communities in America have some similar issues, but rural America and the inner cities have some other issues in terms of economics which aren't about America's disappearing factories. Many inner cities and most of rural America are being left behind in the Internet age because of corporate greed. The telecoms are amongst the most profitable institutions in America, yet they will not reinvest that money into fiber optic infrastructure in most cities, and they decidedly will not reinvest that money into fiber optic infrastructure in rural America. They will not compete against each other and while the FCC has struck a blow against monopoly with the failure of the Comcast-Time Warner merger, it has done nothing to increase competition for Internet Services in most of America.
We need rules and regulations to encourage investment, which realistically means either opening up the loop or significant investments in community owned loops with an open loop to residential users on the Internet front. This seems like a small issue, because the technology in most American cities is adequate, not stellar, but adequate. The same is decidedly not true in small town America, YET small town America is suffering more than America's cities due to the decline of retailers which the Internet accelerates.
Amazon has replaced the parts stores in rural America where you would buy hardware to fix anything from electronics to furniture and almost everything in between. Lowes and Home Depot have picked up some of the slack when it comes to home repairs, while driving the small hardware stores out of business in rural America, but the lack of adequate Internet infrastructure is truly leaving rural America at a major economic disadvantage, and NO ONE is talking about that problem.
Now, nearly forty years into the deindustrialization of America the impacts are hitting rural hospitals hard. Most are in financial dire straights, and many are closing, or seeking bankruptcy protection for a reorganization. The Republicans are not addressing these issues, and neither are the Democrats, because the problem is not merely that the hospitals are closing, but that the communities which supported them economically are dying.
The Republicans beat out the Democrats in small town USA for one reason, guns, because A) everyone in small town USA's daddy owned a gun to go hunting, and B) everyone in small town USA knows that police response times are lousy in rural areas, so they feel safer protecting themselves against intruders. I understand that in the cities of the United States, and in the small towns of the United States that there are far too many gun related homicides, having been a person who testified in a small town murder trial at the age of nine, I know that better than most, but any threat to small town USA's guns by a party that IS NOT speaking to the economic issues facing small town USA creates a hole from which it is hard to climb.
I'm telling you right now, loudly and clearly, the Democratic Party is not only using the wrong language to prick up the ears of small town USA, the Democratic Party is also not addressing their issues.
The issues are numerous, not only is main street dying, retail competition in general is dying. There are no choices in terms of retail in rural America. If you can't get it at Walmart or Lowes, you are screwed, unless you have the Internet, in which case Amazon is your only saving grace. The factories which helped big cities fail, absolutely crush small town USA when one leaves because there is nothing at all to replace it. If you lived in a small town with a factory that employed 600 people and it closed, the restaurants close, the stores close, the banks close, the barbers close. A small portion remain behind and most people move away. There are as many boarded up houses in small town USA as there are in Detroit or Baltimore. The people who stay behind in those small town areas end up commuting several hours to a larger city to find work. This destroys civic life in those communities. The factory men and women who used to participate in the Elks Clubs, Rotary Clubs, or Bowling Leagues, have no time for that because of the daily commute.
A candidate who speaks to those issues, who understands the death of rural America is far more likely to win over those voters by speaking to how we fix those problems, than the candidate who scares those voters with the gun issue. Unfortunately the current establishment does not care about these people, has nothing for them, and nothing to offer them.
The thing is, when we fix the problems facing America's small towns, those same solutions will probably help revive America's inner cities. I guess the real problem is the 800 pound gorilla or giant white elephant in the room Wall Street and its money. If the same corporate raiders who have been selling off America piece by piece since the day Ronald Reagan took office are allowed to continue to do so, there is no way to fix what is wrong with America.
I see one candidate in the present field with solutions which might begin to right the ship, and despite the fact that he lives in rural America and has done so by choice since he was a young man, Brooklyn hasn't served him well. There is a certain subtlety that is lost on people from the country. You need to hit them upside the head repeatedly with a baseball bat to impart wisdom most of the time. I say this as a country person. Tell small town USA how you intend to fix it. They really are listening, unfortunately nobody is selling them anything worth buying.
I have some suggestions for how to fix rural America, but I will save them for another ramble. For now, I only hope that the Democratic Party begins to wake up to the fact that the Republican Party could lose rural voters if the Democrats ever focused on rural economic development. Those jobs won't help the keyboard set, so maybe dailykos isn't the place to make the argument, but it seems like the only place anyone with an idea not congruent with the Wall Street funded echo chambers known as think tanks can slip an idea into the political consciousness of the party.